


Revolutionary Love

by wanabi



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Cults, Comment Fic, Mass Suicide, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-09
Updated: 2013-10-09
Packaged: 2017-12-28 21:33:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/996948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wanabi/pseuds/wanabi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You can set things alight, and you can live life after life in worlds beyond this, Harry explains, but that does not mean you are a phoenix.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Revolutionary Love

**Author's Note:**

> Written in June for the "No Shame" Wish Fulfillment Ficathon, off of the prompt "ensemble + polyamory, Harry Potter is the leader of a cult + mass suicide."

He teaches them magic.  
  
Not wand-waving, nothing too silly--Hermione had stared with legs crossed and fingers slowly interweaved, tapping on the arms of a chair, immediately skeptical of the strange man with the scarred face, who claimed to know magic. Preposterous, really. Who did he think he was?  
  
"Today," he says, "my name is Harry."  
  
"Today? What's that supposed to mean?"  
  
"Yesterday," he touches his scar, "I lived another life. I was struck down, and here I am living again. Tomorrow, who's to say? Maybe you will call me teacher."  
  
She knows the universe is enormous, that probabilistically speaking there are other worlds than theirs. Who's to say there might not be other beings, walking the stars? "My father came from Sirius, and has already returned," he explains. "My mother has seen the morning and the evening star."  
  
"Technically," says Hermione, "they're the same thing."  
  
Technically, she thinks, there's an awful lot of connections out there. Between the stars in the sky, between the cells of her body. Among the people on the websites that she sets up, casually--it's a steady income, programming for them and making contacts, and leaves her time free to schedule around so she can follow this strange prophet, and maybe figure out what he's all about.

* * *

Neville is not a revolutionary.  
  
"I'm not a revolutionary," says Neville.  
  
"Oh I think you are," says Harry. "I believe you yet may be."  
  
Harry believes in him, and maybe--  
  
"My grandmother would never stand for it," he says, looking down.  
  
"There's nothing to be ashamed of," Harry takes his hand. "Your flesh and blood on this earth may be happenstance, but do you think we're all cursed to be bound by our family's blood? You're a free man, free to be whatever you decide. Free to make a family of your own, if you choose."  
  
He looks up at Hermione and the computers she modestly controls, at Harry's broken face and living eyes, and thinks maybe he'd like to choose more than what he is. But he doesn't deserve--  
  
"Do you have other family? Others you'd want to come with you?"  
  
Harry is a revolutionary, and he understands that when you want to turn the world upside down, even the lowest and meanest are valued, are made holy. And so he follows Neville to the smelly hospital ward where Frank and Alice lie blankly, and reaches out to touch their hands. "You see what we are, all of us? Vessels, carrying our souls for a little bit at a time."  
  
Neville thinks he sees.

* * *

 

Ron has family that he wants to come with, of course. Ginny is always itching to build their revolution outward, to topple the world as they know it.  
  
"Not yet," says Harry. "We can rise above it in flight, look beyond it to the future or backwards to the past, but we must love even the counterrevolutionaries."  
  
"Well I'm sorry," said Ginny, "only my love is all used up, here."  
  
"Then that's not love," says Harry, "not yet." Love isn't love until it pulses and grows and explodes out of you. Not just for your family and friends, but for people of every race and creed, every place and time, and every world in the sky.  
  
"What if I'm not enough?" says Ron. "What if I'm just a--a counterrevolutionary?"  
  
"If you are born into a closeminded world," says Harry, "then we forgive you. Look at Neville! He didn't start out as a leader, he didn't ask for greatness or personal glory or fame."  
  
"None of us are perfect," says Hermione, "if we're building a new community, then we need everyone, we can't choose to leave anyone out. We're looking for all sorts of people. People like you."  
  
"You don't know me, you don't know if I'm good for anything."  
  
"It's not about being good for anything in particular," says Neville, "all these artificial distinctions are drawn up to divide us, turn us against each other. All you have to be is good."  
  
"What the hey," says Ron. "I've seen Ginny blow things up. I'd just as soon not be left behind, if she decides to blow something up out here."  
  
"You've seen me blow things up?" Ginny repeats.  
  
"Well, I mean, yeah..."  
  
She swears. "I thought I was getting better at covering my tracks."

* * *

Luna is very patient at correcting Hermione's star charts and elaborately explaining why aliens could only have arrived in certain civilizations and not others. There are solar winds, one must understand, that interfere with flight paths. The crop circles point to crafts that are only so high, and can only travel at a certain speed, at least under sublunary constraints. "It's different beyond the ecliptic, you know. When they're not bound by our ethereal interference."

Sometimes Hermione wants to snap at her, but snapping is counterrevolutionary when love is the law of the land.  
  
"I've always been a revolutionary," she explains. She wears shells around her neck, radishes in her ears, pine cones around her wrists, tall grass in her hair. "Only I'm not a very good one, you know, because I've never really understood exactly what we're revolting  _against_."  
  
"So much the better for you," says Ginny, "it's a rubbish world, out there."  
  
"But that makes you all so brave, to be able to choose to walk away from it. I never had much of a choice."  
  
"We're only brave because we have to be. To catch up to people like you."  
  
"What about your parents?" says Neville.  
  
"They taught me everything I know, of course. Oh, yes, they'd settled down and had me! It didn't seem very revolutionary, you know, but then we were a commune of our own. Do you remember, Ginny? Ron? You used to come play with me, and we'd share all the sandbox together."  
  
"I think I do remember," Ginny says, "yeah."  
  
"And then, well, they were being pursued by subversive elements, and so they went on ahead of me. I'm sure I'll catch up with them later, in another plane. No one ever thought to reeducate me, though. Perhaps they didn't think I was old enough to really believe much of anything."  
  
Neville nods. "My parents are stuck between planes, I think."  
  
"Oh, don't worry," says Luna. "We have plenty of time."  


* * *

  
You can set things alight, and you can live life after life in worlds beyond this, Harry explains, but that does not mean you are a phoenix. A phoenix lives alone, it is its own egg.  
  
But what  _they_  are is a community, and what communities must do is live together. Everyone is made equal, in love. Gone are the old labels--husband or wife, brother or sister. Together, they make themselves a community.  
  
Harry has adored Hermione's mind, and she has touched his scar. Neville has taught Ginny how to heal the seekers, who stumble into their little commune needing more, and she has showed him how to burn away the debris of the old world. Ron has listened to Luna's stories, falling silent below the incantation of her voice, and she has laughed at his jokes, humor redoubling into the night. And further. They live in faith, and when they sense each other at night, there is no need for questions.   
  
"Are we meant to be faithful  _to_  people in particular, though?" Ron asks Hermione, one day waiting for sunrise.  
  
She thinks it over and says "The particularities, no. Particularities give rise to factions, to discrimination, to injustice. But let's set all talk of loyalty aside; today I love you."  
  
"Today I love you, too. And tomorrow?"  
  
"I don't make promises, but if tomorrow I were to love you as well, I would not be surprised."  
  
"And neither would I."  
  
"And I would not ask what you had done, all the rest of the day."  
  
He nods, and breaths, and then rises to meet the day and everyone he might find there.  
  
Most of all they love Harry, and Harry loves them all and each. He is their father, their brother, their friend. And if there were to be any new revolutionaries, born among them, then he would be their father too, and it would be the first world they knew.

* * *

 

There aren't, though. Perhaps because, in the right light, they look like little more than children themselves.  
  
"And so much the better," says Luna. "The longer you stayed outside, the more poison seeps into you, the more miasmas in the air, can infiltrate your vessels. Distort your thought."  
  
But her thoughts are always clear and piercing, the sort of straightforward beams of light that could arc around the universe and come back to illumine you from behind. No matter how far you run, you are bound to the same world, and need to be careful lest you wind up back where you started.  
  
She reads prophecies, and Hermione looks them over with a squinting eye. "What's wrong?" Luna asks.  
  
"I can't tell--are they vague  _because_  they want people to interpret them in different ways? Or because nobody knows any more than this?"  
  
"Why does it matter?"  
  
"The revolutionary struggle--this can't be just some historical determinism, we need to be  _choosing_  how we move forward. If we're just following what has already been fated to happen, then no matter how much good we do, we're not free."  
  
Harry, of course, is the final arbiter. "No, we're free to decide. But the prophecies can aid us, tell us the most auspicious dates to take any action."  
  
"I wish I knew how to translate this," says Hermione. "Escape? Triumph? Destroy?"  
  
"Well, give it time," says Ron, "of course you can do it."  
  
She blushes. "We might not have much time. Until the solstice?"  
  
"I'll cross-reference the originals," says Luna. "We can figure it out."  


* * *

  
  
And they do. Once they talk things over, the nuances become clear. Soon enough the solstice becomes a deadline for, not the translation, but Harry to brew his potion.  
  
"I thought you said this was magic?" Hermione laughs, as another draft of a draught almost explodes across the room.  
  
"Magic is powerful," Harry shrugs, "you have to be careful with it."  
  
"I'll say. Do you need any help?"  
  
"No. I--it needs to be me."  
  
She nods, and lets him be. They trust him, after all. There is power in his blood.  
  
"This is it?" Ginny squints when she sees. "What about, you know. The revolution?"  
  
"The revolution will come," says Ron.  
  
"Eventually," Hermione clarifies. "It's not set in stone. It's a process, an ascension."  
  
"You just wanted to set more things on fire," Neville says blandly.  
  
"When I'm done with the computer," says Hermione, "you can burn that."  
  
And so she does. She almost wants to purge away her vessel, with it, but not yet. They are not phoenices, after all.  
  
It's Neville who brings the potion out to the others, the latecomers to the commune who have popped up around them. They think of him as more of a leader than Harry, who might as well be all spirit already, a flame in the shadows. Neville is a man, someone they can be like. Sturdy, resolute. Unafraid as he carefully pours them a few precious drops.  
  
It's not long before Ron has joined him outside, hauling the useless bodies into elaborate patterns, following one of Hermione's cramped sketches. They're most of the way through before Ron mutters "This is mental."  
  
"What?" Neville says. "I mean, literally or figuratively?"  
  
"Both. I mean. If people have gone on, you know, beyond this, what's the point of moving them into the crop circles or whatever?"  
  
"Don't look at me, I'm not the brains of this operation."  
  
"Oh don't be humble."  
  
"I think it's some sort of channel. You know, for the waves to become more refined, so they can make a more positive impact on the planet, instead of just dissipating."  
  
"Thoughtful."  
  
"Hermione comes up with everything. Careful, now, we don't want them to overlap too much."  
  
And with that, they rotate the last body into place. It's fortunate, really, how neatly they had added up. A good augur.  
  
And then they're back among their closest friends, the absence of only a few minutes nevertheless giving them an excuse to embrace again. Nothing more--it won't do to be crude, after all, now that they're ready at last to leave their ungainly vessels behind. All the same, it feels familiar, welcome.

* * *

 

"Right," says Ginny, taking one of the cups, "Bottoms up."  
  
"Not literally," Neville mutters. "That'd disrupt the magic waves or...somesuch."  
  
"All right, all right. Cheers, then."  
  
"Cheers," he echoes, blushing slightly as she gulps it down in one swallow. Or tries to. Some of it splashes onto her face.  
  
"You'll be wanting to lick that off," he says, "it'll look silly."  
  
"Shurrup," she slurs, but complies.  
  
"That's right," he smiles, taking her hand as she eases herself towards the floor. "You're brilliant."  
  
"Thank you," she says. "Thank you..."  
  
He rests his hand on her chest, watching it rise and fall, then shudders. "Well, no sense waiting. If it's ready?"  
  
"Go on," says Harry, kneeling down to pass him another dose of potion. He drinks it quickly, not removing his hand from Ginny.  
  
"It's cold, innit," says Neville, and Harry bites his lip. "Not your fault. I'm no sorcerer."  
  
"But you are a revolutionary," says Hermione. "Now and always. That was more than enough."  
  
"You really think so?"  
  
"I know so. And, better, I believe it."  
  
"I didn't deserve you," he mutters. "You could've...done better..."  
  
"Never," says Harry. "This is the right place, the right time."  
  
Neville's eyes spin in his face; he seems to gulp, but said nothing.  
  
"Here you are, then," says Hermione, handing Ron another small cup.  
  
He pauses, then reaches for a second. "Together?"  
  
She takes it from him. "Couldn't say no."  
  
Harry had refused to let them practice, over her objections; better to approach the day as a mystery, and then swiftly swallow up death, at the appointed time. It gives her a certain unease to stare into the unreflective shallows, and she swirls the cup around for a moment until it stays in motion, tracing out fluid patterns that rise and fall with her trembling hand.  
  
"C'mon, then," says Ron, "nothing for it."  
  
"Right. Thanks."  
  
The potion spins in spirals, up through the air, into their mouths, then down and--impossibly fast--expanding, coursing through them and lacing them with spurts of magic. This, Ron thinks, is what Harry must feel like all the time, full of possibility and a heartbeat away from leaping into action. This, thinks Hermione, is power too dangerous to be kept in the throats of any one man, or woman. Auspicious, that they were all together. No one to be left alone, lost amid counterrevolutionaries. She has written enough, sent the truth into the spreading clouds, and nobody will call them false.  
  
The power is pulsing between them, and they almost want to be pushed towards each other, to have like meet like. But no, they are not alone, there are others just like them, living and dead, and it is easier to stay still. Let the magic surge with in them, and simply rest...

Harry glances at them all, the remnants of his friends, and scowls. They look so discordant, disordered. A flash of him hopes that he will not look like that, afterwards, but then he remembers that being too concerned with appearances is a weakness. He breathes, trying not to revel in or scorn the air. There needs to be a balance.  
  
"Are you all right, Harry Potter?" Luna asks.  
  
"You don't need to call me that." He wears many names, leader and brother and father, but two simple bisyllables strung together do him no good. "Do I go around calling you Luna Lovegood?"  
  
"You should," she shrugs. "My father gave me that name."  
  
"Well, yes. You're just inheriting it, it's not something you really choose--"  
  
" _He_  chose it. That wasn't his birth name, you know. Just his choice, and my mother's together--you didn't think they were so old-fashioned, that she'd take his father's name? Love. Good. That's all there is to it, in the end."  
  
Of course. And in the end he is there, laboring to keep his eyes open as he sets down the remnants of the potion. He is ready to be complete, and so at the last he will not close his eyes because, for a change, the coming world is no dream. Dreams have their own pain, their own tedious assumptions, and bid you be unfree, following perverse logics even off a cliff. The coming world, however, will make sense. Will make beauty, make changes, make magic. Will...  
  
Luna kneels over him, silent, and then lowers her mouth to his. Then she makes her way around the room, trying to lick any fragments of magic from the lips of her friends, but finds only blood.  
  
No matter; there is enough remaining for her to finish. It will not take much to quell the involuntary actions of her frame. So much the better, that there is less of her to waste.  
  
She takes her time lying down, stretching every muscle she knows and enjoying the brief freedom. Then, she falls asleep, with her hand tracing and retracing Harry's scar.


End file.
